My entire life, dating back to my early childhood, I can remember having a lot of difficulty getting to sleep.
Usually the problem is the spinning thoughts I have as soon as I lay down; instead of being relaxed and peaceful, my brain kicks it into high gear and runs through all my most stressful life decisions. I’ve tried a ton of different medicines, both prescription strength and over the counter, but very few things actually help to resolve the sleeplessness. I’ve found that the best thing I can do for myself to increase my chances of drifting off is to situate myself in an ideally conditioned environment. Specifically, I need the bedroom to be super cold. This is perfectly achievable during the winter; I just shut off my central heating at night, and even crack open a window if necessary. In the morning I adjust the thermostat as soon as I get up so that the furnace will warm up the apartment before I get out of the shower. In the summer time, however, it’s a lot trickier to fend off the hot temperatures and high humidity before bedtime, and I feel like I overuse my air conditioning. There’s not really any other choice except to employ my little AC unit heavily throughout the evening and into night time. Fans certainly don’t work the same way to provide cool, dry air the way that air conditioning does. Although it causes me to pay a little more in electricity to be constantly powering my AC, it’s worth it to be able to get some sleep.